Transcript

Reel History: a look at life through motion film

Fiona Kinsey, Lorenzo Iozzi & Philip Batty, 9 August 2017 

[CHAIR & INTRODUCTIONS: LIZA DALE-HALLETT]

First I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we are on today. The Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung people of Kulin nation. I pay respects to those elders past and present.

I'm Liza Dale-Hallett. I'm museum curator here, Senior Curator Sustainable Futures. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce and chair today's lecture, which is called Real Stories: A Look at Life Through Motion Film. And for those involved in the MIFF, a international film festival, this is obviously an extension of that.

We've got three fabulous speakers who are going to talk about wonderful collections that we house here in the Humanities Department. We're going to be given an insight into the evolution of film from the very earliest devices, right through to smart phones. We'll have a little bit of an information session on digitization. And we are going to travel back to 1991 and have a look at the very first ethnographic film in Australia, the second only in the world.

So that's a treat in store. And of course, how can we talk about film without talking about Kodak. So all three are going to be fabulous. We've got Philip Batty, Lorenzo Iozzi, and Fiona Kinsey. And I'd just like to welcome the first speaker, please.

Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you all for coming along to our lecture today, Real Stories: Life and Motion Film. First up, I'd like to thank the audio-visual digitization team at museum Victoria. The team is John Broomfield, manager of media production; Belinda Gourley conservator for images and audio visual collections; Phil Masters, who brought unique technical skills to the digitization project; and Stephen Dixon and Robert Digarro, video producers. Some of his creative work you get a glimpse of in the course of this lecture. A big thanks goes out to all of them for their amazing work.

I'd like to begin with a quote by Pasolini, one of the great directors of last century who said, "When I make a film, I immerse myself in a state of pure fascination before an object, or a thing, the look of someone's face or a landscape, as though it were a case of the sacred about to burst forth from that device, the camera."

It's a telling statement. He's not talking about epic film making or the art of making a feature. But rather how film can reveal the spiritual behind the ordinary things. For him, the camera wasn't a philtre between the eye and the real, but a tool to dig deeper into that reality. We're going to put Pasolini's assertion to the test in this lecture, which is an even bigger statement because Museums Victoria has several thousand motion films in its collection.

And we'll be showing but a few fragments from those many films today. But those fragments contain many objects, many landscapes, many faces and many things that are quote "talks about." But in the end, all film points to just one thing, life. And that brings us back to the title of our lecture today. It's also at the heart of the museum's mission, which is to create knowledge and experience that help us make sense of the world.

The museum's motion film collection goes back to the origins of the medium. Home movies or animated movies, indigenous life, manufacturing and industry, farming, migration and social history are just a few of the major themes embodied in the collection. The collection is preserved in a purpose-built cold storage unit for film-based images. But because of the fragile nature of film, the collection has been largely inaccessible and, therefore, invisible.

Over the past four years though, the museum has begun the challenging and expensive task of digitising some of the films, in order to make them available to researchers and the general public. Often the film is the only copy in existence, so great care is taken to ensure the film is not damaged during the digitization project. Large digital files need their own special care to ensure that the data is not corrupted, and that the digital copies are securely held and properly documented.

Some of the films that we have processed, and that we'll see segments from today, are Australia's first ethnographic films, as you've heard, which were made in 1901 by Baldwin Spencer, a former director of the museum. A trip to the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission in 1939. And films generated by Kodak when the company was at the peak of its success in the 1960s.

As well as the many motion films in the collection, the museum also houses the artefacts behind the technology of film making, the movie cameras, the projectors and related equipment tracing the history of motion. Not only the history of motion film, but also the history of pre-cinema which embraces media without which motion film would not exist.
The Magic Lantern for example, which could animate an image by simple mechanical devices. Some of you may have seen this film in the Melbourne story upstairs, but it's worth dwelling on some of the details. Magic Lantern wasn't an overstatement. It would have been magical to see these images projected in the late 1700s and early 1800s when images were a rarity really.

They were in the mind, only available to the rich. But along comes this machine, which could project images at home. The simple devices include the sliding of a glass over another still image. The rotating of a cog over a still image to create an optical illusion. And a lever to animate an object, an image.

Later 19th century developments in the art of animation included the praxinoscope, meaning action viewer and the Zoetrope, meaning the wheel of life or life turning. Where a strip of pictures, when viewed through a series of slots in a rotating disc, created the phenomenon of movement. And photography, which is the basis of all motion film. And motion film, in essence, is just the rapid succession of sequential still photographs, one differing slightly from the preceding one.

Very simple toys really, fun objects, were among the very few forms of entertainment available to people through the Victorian Age. Within a few decades though, motion film was revolutionising our view of the world. Film became the big storyteller. And here's an example of the amount of film stock being produced by a single company, Eastman Kodak in the 1930s.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
Cut, perforated, inspected, and packed in light-tight containers, this motion picture film produced here each year to an amount that would reach 20 times around the Earth, is ready for you. The raw material that will record fact and fiction. The kaleidoscopic panorama of contemporary life on the movie lot, on the news front, in the shops and factory, in the school and in the home.
[END PLAYBACK]

Just as we've had to condense a vast collection of motion film into a few examples, so to we've encapsulated at 130 years of motion film technology into a few objects which we brought along for you today.

So the first object on the table at my left is a bioscope. One of the earliest machines to project 35 millimetre motion film. Next to it, is the type of camera, itself a combined projector, which might have created that film. The third object is an example of how 35-mil film came in its tin canister. The film reel in such a can was about 400 feet in length, 122 metres, and 11 minutes of running time.

The equipment was largely the domain of serious film makers and professionals both because of the technical nature of the equipment and the expense involved in making film at the time.

The next objects are examples of projectors and two movie cameras from the 1950s and 1960s, when making home movies became much more accessible. Fiona will touch on the phenomenal role that Kodak played in this later on.
The next to last object is, of course, something we're all familiar with, the smartphone, which enables us all to be photographers and filmmakers. Most of you probably can't even see the last object on the table from where you're sitting. It's a microSD card for mobile devices. Capable of storing several hundred films depending on file size and capacity of the card.

It's amazing. Before 1895, no human event or natural event could be captured, and then replayed visually as it unfolded in time. If you wanted to experience a sunset, you had to go and stand in front of it to do that. Intrigued by this thought, I searched for sunsets in time lapse on the Internet, and 1.2 million sunsets came up for me.

I guess we brought these objects in today just to show you, to give you some idea, of the evolution that motion film has gone through from a very physical, tangible, mechanical medium. To one that's instantaneous, ethereal, and electronic.
I'd like to return to the first object on the table because it's name embodies the essential nature of motion film, bioscope. From the Greek words meant bio and scope, to look at life. It was the original name for motion film, and for movie houses. The word cinema came into usage later from cinematography, meaning the recording of movement. It's also the title of which we gave this lecture, and the essence behind the quote we started the lecture on.
We'd now like to go to a few films from the collection in a little more detail. And it's fitting that we begin with the first film acquired by the museum and which was shot by Baldwin Spencer. I'd like to invite Philip Batty, Senior Curator, Anthropology Central Australia, to introduce that film.

[APPLAUSE]
Well thanks Lorenzo, that provides a fantastic introduction to where we are at today in terms of motion pictures. Now I'm going to be showing you some films that were shot back in 1901 as Lorenzo pointed out. And as was also pointed out, these are the oldest films in Museum Victoria's collection. They're also the second oldest ethnographic films ever shot in the world. Now I can get them started.

Now I'm going to show you a collection of both stills and film. These films were shot by Baldwin Spencer, who was the director here many years ago, back in the 1920s. And he worked with, his collaborator, Gillen, Frank Gillen in Central Australia. Though interesting characters. Baldwin Spencer was a tough basically from Britain, where he was a professor of biology here Melbourne University. Gillen was the opposite. He was a humble telegraph station operator in Central Australia.

But the thing about Gillen, is that he'd spent 25 years in Central Australia and learned a local language Aranda. And was very, very closely connected with the people in Central Australia. So together, they produced several classic works of anthropology. And their seminal work now largely forgotten, the tribes of Central Australia, had a huge impact worldwide, which was published in 1899.

Sigmund Freud, for example, used it and Emile Durkheim the founder of pretty much French sociology, anthropology pretty much wrote a [INAUDIBLE] of that book. So they were a major hit in their time. And these films they shot have actually really shaped what's become visual anthropology. So I'll just show you shot, first of all, of Spencer. This is Baldwin Spencer sitting with a group of elders in Alice Springs in 1896. Him and Gillen called these the elders The Cabinet, because they were overseeing a major festival in Alice Springs, called the Engwura, that went for about three to four months.

And these men oversaw this amazing, sort of ceremonies that they recorded. And one of the films we're going to show here it was a film of one of the performances that was performed just before this huge festival. It was performed when they were there in 1896.

Now, just before we get to the film, this is a kind of camera, not the exact camera, but this kind of camera they use in their work. And the thing about these cameras is that they are locked off. You couldn't sort of swivel them on a tripod. So all the action had to be performed within a single frame. They couldn't follow the action.

The other thing is that they only had filmstrips, 35-mil filmstrips that went for about 2 and 1/2 to 3 minutes. So they'd usually put the film in the camera, just wind it for 3 and 1/2 minutes, and that was it. And they took a camera similar to this up to Alice Springs in their 1901 expedition. And they put the films they'd shot on the way up to Alice Springs, and in Alice Springs itself, on the backs of camels and sent it back to Adelaide, where they were processed. And they didn't see them for another six months.

Now Spencer was absolutely adept at the technology of the time. And he was always, for him, and for people of the time, this was cutting-edge technology. And Spencer was very good at using the technology. Unfortunately, Gillen wasn't. And he had endless sort of mishaps with the film, with the camera, with the whole thing. And he often got in trouble with Spencer for wasting so much film.

And as you can see, this little drawing and Spencer did. Spencer actually was originally a trial artist. But anyway, he did this little drawing of Spencer getting caught up in the legs of the camera and falling over and causing trouble.

Anyway, now we'll move on to the first film. This is a still the of the first film they recorded at a place called Charlotte Waters on the border of Northern Territory and South Australia. And I should say that all the films I show today are open films that were performed for entertainment by people, and they are open to the broader audience.

There's a whole set of dances that are completely closed. Usually for men only and sometimes women only. They recorded some of these films, we've got them in the collection but we can't play them. We can only play these open ceremonies. So I'll just go to the first film which is the [? Unitha ?] women's dance, shot at Charlotte Waters. And here we go.

Now as can see, it's very, very basic, kind of and crude, form of film. But you have to understand this is actually the very first ethnographic form ever shot in Australia, and the second in the world. And in lot of these open ceremonies, or most open ceremonies, you had a small, you could maybe call a chorus or whatever. A group of people who sang the songs.

And the dancers perform-- perform the songs, perform dances to the rhythm of the songs. And the body decorations, et cetera, that were worn by in this case, women, represented particular ancestors. And as people danced the essence of the ancestor was felt to come out. So yes this is the women's dance recorded at Charlotte Waters in 1901.

OK we'll move on to the next slide. And next dance. This is the teaching gala dance and obviously it is performed by men. This was shot in Alice Springs again on this 1901 expedition right through Central Australia and up to right up to Borroloola actually. Now as I said, the body paint and both on the face and the body etc. represents ancestral heroes, et cetera, that when the dance was performed were manifested.

The other thing I'd say too is that all these dances are performed at night. And there were all kinds of lighting used. Clumps of Spinifex and all kinds of fire used to make these dances a lot more dramatic. But they had to be shot in the day because Spencer and Gillen didn't have any kind of lighting in those times. So I'll move on to the teaching gala dance.

Before that, this is just a still of men preparing for that dance. One of the things you can say about this, is in the preparatory sort of area this is how younger men learn how to do the painting, learn what the stories are about, et cetera. So here's the teaching gala dance. I think, here were are. Yes, this was performed as I said in Alice Springs. But close to the current Heavitree Gap in Alice Springs. If you've ever been to Alice Springs you might be aware of that sort of space that just near the gap.

One of the-- that someone coming in to help one of the dancers, which is interesting. When I've watched these dancers present it these days, there's not a lot of formality about them. People conform them. People are kind of constantly singing out, saying you dance this way, or do that. You have a song wrong, in the middle of the performance. So it's quite unlike sort of formal performances in you know the west where you'd-- there's a set piece and you can't interfere.
But when these dancers go on, you'll find, well I found anyway, people are constantly giving directions and telling people what to do. And sometimes songs are incorrectly sung. And they'll stop and start again and they'll be arguing about which verse comes next. And this even people sort of grew up in the Bush. So anyway, this is one of the films that Spencer and Gillen captured in 1901.

There's just a little bit at the end of this film we can wait for, it's short. Where they unusually shot a piece where the men when they finish the finish the dancing and probably just discussing how much they are going to get paid for the job. Because that's actually what Spencer and Gillen did. They didn't just ask people to do a dance and just shoot it. They had to negotiate a bit. They organised payment in terms of metal axes, metal knives, all kinds of things. Quite often if the dance-- not often, sometimes if the dancers get it wrong, that didn't pay them. Which is kind of mean I thought, but anyway.

They would've actually paid for these dancers. OK I'll move on to the next. One part about this teaching gala dance, I should mention, is that right at the end when it was performed at night the men broke away and ran at the audience. And the audience was mixed with men, women, children. And it was meant to scare away the children and the women so that the more secretive dances could start.

And the other thing that this particular ceremony, like other ceremonies and dances, it was traded. It originated in Queensland. And it was traded right across Queensland up into the territory to Darwin, and then down into Alice Springs. So these dances were basically-- the rights to these dances were traded. And the Aranda basically essentially bought this dance and performed for Spencer and Gillen.

Now the last film I'll show is related to what Spencer and Gillen called a Welcoming Ceremony. And just a little background to the ceremony. Contrary to what was thought back 100 years ago and what people still believe, is that, in some quarters, is that aboriginal groups were just sort of nomadic wanderers that just went anywhere across the land without any kind of direction. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There were very, very strict boundaries to particular tribal areas. And coming into someone else's area you had to be very, very careful. You had to be very appropriate and very polite about it. And when someone did come into the territory, the residents would put on one of these pretty fearsome dances to say look don't mess around in our place. We've got all these spears, weapons, so if you muck around you're in trouble.

The other thing about these welcoming ceremonies is that if there any bad blood between the two groups, they had to sort out the problem first. And there was usually a bit of a spearing or maybe a stabbing or whatever. And once that was cleared the trading, or the exchange of ceremonies could go on.

So we'll get to the film. So, as I was saying the dancers would move up and down in a particular part of when the visitors came. And as you can see, the cameras locked off. Right, they couldn't follow the-- couldn't follow the dancers or the men in this particular case. And as I was saying before, quite often the people in the film would dance out of frame and not come back. And Spencer got so frustrated with this, he wasted several hundred feet of film. And that's when he wouldn't pay the dancers.

But he couldn't get across to people, which is obviously the case, that to keep in frame. But at one point he said, look and he's in his diary, he noted he sort of said in frustration he wondered why the ancestors of these people didn't understand cinematography. Tongue in cheek. But from an anthropological point of view, it's interesting because these images circulated around the world. And it shaped the notion of what aboriginal ceremony and traditions were.

OK I'll move on to the next slide. This is a still. This is from the welcoming ceremony sequence. As I was saying, a whole lot of stuff had to be sorted out between the two groups. And what was happening here is that there was a particular visitor who was accused of not mourning correctly. A close relative of this guy that's just about to throw a spear, saying that you should have mourned our relative more effectively. In fact, you should've cut yourself, which was a tradition. If a close relative died, you had to cut yourself in the arm. So there was a big argument that went on.

But it was sorted out in the end, where the visitor was required to cut himself, and he did. And this was basically to resolve the dispute. And the last episode in the particular sequence was where they burnt small little artefacts that were held on the back of the ears. And after the burning of these artefacts, everything was squared. There was any bad blood was solved. And people would get on with the ceremony.

So as you can see, Spencer and Gillen were able to document the traditions of the Aranda in incredible detail. This had never been done before. And one thing that was outstanding particular of Spencer's work, is that he was able to move amongst events as they unfolded. A lot of photography at that time, and even some of the early cinematography, very, very stilted set pieces. But Spencer was one of the first people, whether anthropologists or anyone, who tried to capture things as they unfolded, which is quite unique.

Anyway I'll just end my section of the talk with slide. This is Gillen on my side and Spencer on the other. And these are two of his aboriginal workers, or assistants. To guy on a far left, on your right, is a guy called Jim Kite. He was a renowned artist at the time. But I'll just say that, one last thing I'd like to say, is that Gillen was with the aboriginal people they photographed and filmed. He quite often put on my magic lantern shows himself at the Alice Springs telegraph station to show the people who'd actually photograph the films.

And people really enjoyed this. And he actually asked him to comment about how they looked in the photographs. And Gillen loved it because he told Spencer that this really enhanced his powers of magical omnipotence. And really kind of impressed the local people to put on a lantern show.

The other thing I'll mention too is that a lot of these films are now actually used by the descendants of the Aranda in Alice Springs. There was the festival called the Anbartua a festival put on a couple of years ago. And the people running it are the descendants of the people in these films. Actually used these films to recreate the dances. So they're still very much a living part of both film history in Australia and also of Aranda people in Alice Springs. That's the end of my section. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]
Thanks Phil for that insight into three stunning films. And not only with the film stunning but the still photographs too were amazing. The next film is my favourite one in the collection. It's a compilation of small segments from three films which, in the original, total about 40 minutes of footage. I love it because it touches on universal themes. Humanity, art and the Australian landscape.

I think the measure of a good film or good art for that matter is that you want to keep looking at it. You want to keep coming back to it. And this film does it for me. I hope it's the case for you too. Because these are edited segments from three films, I'll briefly narrate the story behind each.

In 1939 a group of missionaries set out from the Wesley Church in Lonsdale street in small motor trucks to visit remote areas of Central Australia and the Northern Territory. It was part missionary work and part sightseeing. Their main destination was the Lutheran Mission, the Lutheran Aboriginal Mission at Hermannsburg, which was established in 1877.
Among the necessities for the long trip we know that several members of the group carried movie cameras. There is evidence of this in the films. They arrived at Hermannsburg then a community of about 300 people, in early morning and witnessed the daily life of the mission. Children were having breakfast, playing in the sun or preparing for school. The men and women going about their everyday work ensuring the survival of the little community.

Later that morning, the group met artist Albert Namatjira who was born at Hermannsburg in 1902. Like many people who lived at Hermannsburg, Namatjira had many jobs and skills. Blacksmithing, carpentry, farming and stock men. It was around the time of the visit that Namatjira was becoming famous for his painting. He had had his first solo exhibition in Melbourne the year before.

Namatjira showed the visitors paintings made by the children under his tutelage. Then he pulled out one of his paintings, a watercolour, of Standley chasm, about 100 kilometres from Hermannsburg. The group went on and explored the mission. They visited the little stone church with its congregational bell suspended between two gum trees.

Then the visitors took in country beyond Hermannsburg and saw an ancient landscape which was also home to introduce species like horses, camels, goats, dogs and chickens. They crossed what is said to be the oldest river in the world. In Alice Springs they visited another aboriginal home colloquially known as The Bungalow, a former telegraph station.
There, they also met up with a flying doctor. Incongruous as it was landing in the desert landscape, and they assisted a patient from the plane. Incidentally the flying doctor had been established by the Presbyterian church about 10 years before.

Inspired by Namatjira's painting, the missionaries travelled on to Standley chasm and saw the sacred rock for themselves. They stood at the very spot where Namatjira created his painting. And you'll see the incredible similarity. It's hard to tell the painting from the real thing.

Standley chasm, a place of indescribable beauty, is how they described it. They saw this painting at Hermannsburg and it's framed purposely for an exhibition. So Namatjira had exhibited that painting the year before, or had intentions of exhibiting it.

The group had seen many things and had much to tell people back in Melbourne. But when they returned home they soon forgot about Hermannsburg, Namatjira and Standley chasm. Because shortly after they returned the prime minister of the day announced that Australia was at war. Fortunately, fortunately that film made its way to Museums Victoria. And there it is somewhere in our cold storage unit with all the many other films and stories that the museum preserves.

We don't know who donated this film to the museum and when. At the time, it was probably collected primarily for its format or its technological significance as an example of that output if you like, of film making rather than the power of the content. That said, in subsequent years, the museum would've preserved that film as though that canister contained some sanctity of life I'm sure.

Film content was much harder to catalogue and, therefore, preserve back then. In part because of the difficulty of viewing, and playing film back and forward to view it repeatedly so as to interpret its content without the risk of damage. That risk is mitigated today with the possibility of digitising film; thereby minimising the handling of the analogue format.

We're now going to jump to the 1960s when home movies became popular. And I'd like to introduce Fiona Kinsey, Senior Collection Manager of Images and Image Making to take us there.

[APPLAUSE]
Hi there. I'm just going to put another hat on for the moment, because I'm also the co-convener of the lecture series this year. And it's so fantastic to see an almost full house. So thank you very much for coming along. And thank you to our marketing and bookings team for supporting our event.

I'm sorry, Liza, Lorenzo and I've all been struck down by our horrible virus. So if I cough during this please, excuse me. So Lorenzo and Phil both presented some really interesting footage that they're clearly quite passionate about. And I'm also going to be talking about the collection that I'm passionate about too. It's a collection I acquired about 12 years ago, and which I've worked on since then.

The Kodak Heritage Collection. And I can see there's some former Kodak staff in the audience as well. So nice to see you're keeping the passion for Kodak going and keeping on turning up. Come down and say hello afterwards.
Now we're running a little bit behind time so I'm going to race through a few things. For those who don't know about the background of the collection, I'm just going to give you a little bit of info. But I just wanted to say I'm not going to be talking about how Kodak influenced the history of motion film. I'm really going to be talking about the local history of the Kodak Company and its factories in Melbourne.

So Kodak Australiasia history reaches back over 100 years to 1884 when the company originated as Baker and Rouse in the Melbourne suburb of Abbotsford before merging with Kodak and later moving to Coburg where a new factory was opened in 1961. For the majority of its existence, the company made and marketed photographic products such as glass plates, film paper, processing chemicals and cameras. It also operated processing laboratory to develop and print photographs.

In 2004, Kodak Australiasia's long history of photographic manufacturing came to an end when the Kodak factory closed down. Before the site was vacated, Museums Victoria worked closely with Kodak to acquire a large and significant collection called the Kodak Heritage Collection. There are over 20,000 items in that collection with 10,000 already registered. And that number is growing by the day with a dedicated team working on it.

The material includes objects and documents with images in a variety of formats. Obviously the dominant type of item which is not at all surprising for a photographic company. And in regards to the moving image, there are over 500 examples in the Kodak collection dating from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. These are the 16-mil films or videocassettes. But we also have a couple of [? bone ?] digital files on DVD. We are yet to view the videocassettes, but we have digitised 134 reels of 16 millimetre film in the last few years. And were working to document and analyse that content.

The footage mostly relates to marketing or technical information about film. And sadly only a small proportion of it shows Kodak's factories and its other industrial operations. Considering we have thousands of still images in the Kodak collection, what does motion film bring us that photographs don't already provide? In many cases, the photographs show a broader range of content over a wider date period. And so it could be argued that they're in some way is more useful than the relatively small number of films that we hold.

But our moving footage provides unique visual content that doesn't exist in our still photographs. It also gives us a different level of immediacy and intimacy that provides movement, and also transport suspecting time and allows us to bear witness to the scene unfolding in front of us. And it can, but not always does, bring sound to the scene providing another sense with which to experience history. So there are many reasons, both visceral and practical, why motion film is so evocative and I think valuable in the study of Kodak's history.

But we shouldn't think of our moving footage as showing an unmediated truth. Decisions are made about what to record and what to leave out. And as Phil has mentioned, the characteristics of the cameras in the film can impact on what the camera can actually capture. And once recorded, film of course can be edited. So when creating moving footage we're creating meaning. Sometimes over time meaning is also lost, especially when there's no broader context of information. As Lorenzo mentioned in regards to the Hermannsburg mission footage, which is missing some of its provenance and thus missing part of its story.

So what all that means is, as a curator, I need to bring a critical mind to understanding the moving footage. Aside from knowing what format the film is in, I like to ask, who made that footage and why. Who is the intended audience? How does it fit into a broader story? And how representative is that film collection? And I'll be keeping those questions in mind as I show you some footage today.

I'll be screening three pieces, and I wanted to get started with something fun. So I'm going to show you a selection of Kodak television commercials. We have around 200 of those dating from the late-1950s to the 1970s. And about 60 of them have been digitised. Now they may be short, but these TV commercials they are packed full of important historical information. As well as showing us the products, the camera technology and film chemistry of the time.

The commercials are also a window into the embryonic industry-- sorry the embryonic television industry of period and their advertising formats. They're also a lens into gender roles, the role of children in society, and representations of white Australia. They're very much a product of their time. So do enjoy them.

[BEGIN PLAYBACK] In 1888, Kodak produced the first snapshot camera for the family. In 1935, Kodak introduced the now famous Kodachrome colour film and brought colour photography to the world. And now, in 1962, Kodak opens up a new world of colour with Kodachrome II colour film for both colour slides and movies. Its 2 and 1/2 times as fast as regular Kodachrome, gives truer colour and sharper pictures.

Available now at no increase in price from all Kodak dealers.  Tonnes more fun. Lots more fun when a camera helps you record. Tonnes more fun. Twice the fun way to fun saves it all. Whether you save your fun in colour movies, colour slides or colour snapshots, there's a Kodak colour film to save it all its sparkling best. So when there's fun in store,
Take you camera along and save it in Kodak pictures. This  Programme is sponsored by Kodak, Australia's own photographic industry. Serving the nation through health, industry, commerce. And serving you in everyday life through family picture making.

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[END PLAYBACK]

Just going to skip over one that I had because we're running short on time. They're pretty catchy aren't they? I mentioned earlier, there is little footage of Kodak's Australia industrial operations compared to all the technical and marketing material in our holdings. There's only a handful of examples all in 16 millimetre format. Although when we view the video cassettes we might reveal some more industrial content.

Just quickly want to just say that a reason for these low representation might be that while footage was taken it just hasn't survived. And also the Kodak factory footage that has survived is largely skewed to the representation of activities undertaken in white light. For example, film sorting, photochemical packaging, laboratory work and office work. Although there is some footage of our photographs being printed on the safe light conditions.

So there's a real lack of visual representation of the company's core business of emulsion making and coating work and film developing. And that's the same with the still photographs. I won't go into a lot of the reasons why, except to say that one of the main reasons is that photographic products are light sensitive. And so they are made and they're processing in dark or safe light conditions. So it made it pretty hard to actually film those processes.

Also there was very strict industrial confidentiality around Kodak and its emulsion-based products. In the US, that protectionism was called the Silver curtain. So all of that was likely to have restricted the visual documentation of the manufacturing process. But as Lorenzo showed you before with the footage of the assembly line of motion film, some of that footage was captured elsewhere in the UK and the US. Probably where there was perhaps a bit more of a larger audience and more and more money to kind of put into that. Because if you had to stop your production line to film it you're losing a lot of money so you had to be pretty careful.

So where the footage of the factory does exist, it's clear today that it was probably recorded to mark an important occasion in the company's history. One of the main occasions that I've identified was, not surprisingly, when Kodak was transitioning to upgrade its facilities and move to Coburg. Its new factory site, which opened in the 1960s.

It was a great sign of success for the company. But quite sad for staff who had to leave behind their old work sites. And so both the old and the new sites have been captured on moving film at this time. And of course another occasion was leading up to the closure of the Coburg factory in 2004. Which was a devastating experience for staff and a symbol, of course, of the company falling victim to the digital transformation in photography around the world.

So what we have is quite rare. And I'd like to just show you a couple of examples from the period of transition when Kodak was moving to Coburg. Just going to skip that one. This is Burnley that I'm going to talk about first, where Kodak's photochemical and black and white film processing plant was located for 20 years until the early 1970s. The segment, I'm going to show you is a three-minute excerpt from an original film of 16 millimetre film that is eight minutes long. It's a silent film, and it documents production lines relating to the photographic chemicals.

Although if we have a number of the still photographs of Burnley, which I just had up on the screen, we actually don't have any of the assembly lines. So this footage gives a really important and rare insight into the Burnley workplace at this time. The footage allows us to follow the flow of the mixing, packing and labelling of chemical products, and quality control processes.

And the building you're saying was actually the old Barnes honey factory, which Kodak moved into in the early 1950s. One of the main things that jumps out at me in regards to the footage is that aside from the work being highly manual, is its somewhat dubious occupational, health and safety standards, which I can hear you chuckling at. These standards may be normal for industry at this time. I'm not really sure. I haven't done a lot of research into that. But I know by the time the plant move to Coburg a few years later, there was a lot more scrutiny on safety, and an increasing focus on quality and efficiency.

So in comparison to the new Coburg factory, which was both modern in form and function, this footage of Burnley seems to me to represent the old ways of doing things at Kodak, which ended when the factory moved to Coburg. The footage was donated by Brian Daniels, a former manager of the Burnley photochemical department. He was also an enthusiastic amateur cameraman. From conversations with him, we believe he shot this film himself. It was shot in late 1969 just a few years before the Burnley operations were transferred to Coburg.

And so we might understand this footage as a staff member fondly capturing his workplace and colleagues for posterity. It's almost in the genre of a home movie rather than a slick piece of corporate promotional footage that was officially commissioned and professionally filmed. The fact that Brian kept this film for almost 50 years suggests its importance to him. And the fact that it was kept with him rather than in the official corporate archive, just reinforces to me that this was probably his personal and unofficial memento mori about his workplace.

But while this film was intended as a memory of Brian's workplace, and it shows us specific things about the photochemical assembly lines, it also tells us about Kodak's workforce demographic. The division of labour in the department, in terms of which tasks were allocated to women versus men, and the technology and safety practises used in the factory. So the film is useful for labour historians and others more generally, not just people interested in Kodak itself. And so despite its low light, and at times wonky handheld shots, I'm really thankful that Brian thought to record this footage and he kept it and donated it to the museum.

I'm going to quickly move onto Coburg. So while this was a staff members homage to his workplace, the Coburg factory film I'm going to show you was taken a few years after the official opening. And it's a far more professional endeavour. While we don't know the cinematographer in this case, the footage, 11 minutes in length and silent, does appear to be professionally shot. It has a title Coburg Tour. And you could just see some people coming down the steps on a tour. It's clearly more corporate in nature celebrating the modern, shiny, new factory.

Its rationale, the film's rationale was probably to promote the factory and its services to customers, and also to the global Kodak family. Perhaps particularly head office in the US who had invested heavily in the new factory infrastructure. But there was a lot of interest in the factory and the staff, led by Bill West, did used to take people on tours quite regularly. So the film I guess did that in a virtual sense.

So the footage shows a wide range of activities around the factory. We can see business systems, marketing staff, who just before were demonstrating their Recordak equipment to visitors. Someone was just operating a large format camera. Here someone's doing some test printing.

There's also views of some of the services gantry around the factory which carried chilled water and brine and other things for all the departments. And that's one of the expansion loops for the stain, I believe. The chimney and power house are also shown in this shot. Power house was the heart of the factory really. There's laboratory testing. And we're inside the power house at the moment. So some of you former Kodak folks in the audience might recognise lots of these places.

I'm almost finished, I'm just going to wrap this up. So women here in building 20 with the processing of film to place for customers. And just after this is a view from building 8, the administration building which was, I think, four stories high. And it was looking down onto the distribution centre. And here it is now. Where delivery vans and forklifts move in and out of the loading dock. And there's a final shot showing a van moving through the side and it has great views over the factory roof line.

So, as you see, in the footage gives us a great tour of the Kodak factory at a time when the company was experiencing great success and lots of growth. It's a large and complex enterprise. But just as with the Burnley footage, the Kodak tour does not just show us the nature of the work undertaken in the factory. It also gives us insights into the diversity of the workforce, the architecture and layout of the factory, the optimism of the company.

And the last shot here shows the factory adjacent to a housing estate and undeveloped land, highlighting the ongoing tension between industry and residential space on our urban fringes. Again the footage is not just useful for photographic history scholars, but a great resource for industrial and urban historians.

So I just want to say in finishing, that by being digitised these films have become accessible. They probably weren't viewed for decades before this. Now that they are accessible, there's lots of opportunities to be undertaken and for new understanding to be made. We already have some research partnerships with some of the local universities to look at the history of manufacturing in Melbourne. And some of these films will be part of a case study for that. Later on in the year, some of the excerpts that you've seen will be on our collections online website. And so I really encourage you to take a look, make use of this wonderful resource, whether it's for your scholarly purposes or just for your enjoyment.
And so I hope you enjoy watching the footage and learned a little bit about Kodak. And I'm going to hand back to Lorenzo now to finish off. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]
Thanks Fiona. As Fiona was speaking, I was asking myself how significant is that film? And I thought of the company proudly opening the plant, filming it. But as we all know, the plant is no longer there, but the film has survived.
That concludes our lecture, which was to be a celebration of the wonderful world of motion film at Museums Victoria. We hope that you've enjoyed it. And we might take some questions now. We've got a roaming mic or two, one there with Liz. Any questions?

Thank you. Thank you that was a really great presentation. I'm interested to know the digitization process whether you digitise the films in-house at the museum, or whether you got a contractor externally to do that.
We, the museum, has got two Steenbeck editing machines. And we digitised in-house to access quality, for curators to then determine the significance of each film, and then get it digitised to a much higher resolution in a preservation standard externally.

Hello, just a comment. The Coburg factory of Kodak is where the Cineon process was developed. Which is now the basis of all non-linear editors. So virtually anything you see on a screen uses a non-linear editor based on the Cineon on process based at Coburg Kodak. Just a comment.

Thank you for that insight.
I might just respond. Can I just ask your name? OK. We've done a couple of interviews with some people who worked on Cineon and in our collection those are all history. So we have documented some of that process. But I'm happy to chat further if you come up after.
Any more questions?

[INAUDIBLE]
There is. Not a great deal because by the 1940s and 1950s it had all been converted to cellulose. But when you combine the images and the motion film, yes there is. We do have some nitrite. And as you know that take special care because it's self-combustible in quantities.

Unless there is an urgent and immediately important question, we might need to call a close to what is a fabulous story that's an ongoing one. And what I think that stands out to me as a museum curator, is the paradox of digital that it pretty much was the demise of Kodak. But it's also the burden of museums, and yet it's also the saviour. Because of course it's through digital and digitization that we can share our collections. But at the same time all of us of course are accumulating tens of thousands of images and moving footage, which then becomes a curatorial nightmare for Fiona especially. Thank you very much an please thank the speakers.